


Soft

by golden_redhead



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, Hurt, Introspection, Post-Game(s), Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:20:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22457101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/golden_redhead/pseuds/golden_redhead
Summary: Momota is soft.He’s soft in the way he looks at her, soft when his warm hand brushes against her cold one, soft when he looks up at the evening sky and searches for the stars, calm and peaceful, because they are always there for him, waiting, a comforting constant.Harukawa isn’t used to soft things.She knows the sharp sting of a knife piercing through skin, she knows the shattered glass and bullet wounds, she knows the rough touch of fresh scars under her fingers. She knows the smell of blood and dark alleys reeking of urine.
Relationships: Harukawa Maki & Momota Kaito, Harukawa Maki/Momota Kaito
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	Soft

Momota is soft. 

He’s soft in the way he looks at her, soft when his warm hand brushes against her cold one, soft when he looks up at the evening sky and searches for the stars, calm and peaceful, because they are always there for him, waiting, a comforting constant.

Harukawa isn’t used to soft things. 

She knows the sharp sting of a knife piercing through the skin, she knows the shattered glass and bullet wounds, she knows the rough touch of fresh scars under her fingers. She knows the smell of blood and dark alleys reeking of urine. 

She herself is anything but soft, too rough around the edges for that, all stinging insults and venomous threats. There’s nothing soft about her and there never will be, she’s too hard-skinned for that, too uncouth. She never got a chance to be soft, her skin scattered with scars she doesn’t even remember getting, her life an endless stream of blood stains and bodies riddled with bullet wounds. 

She knows the feeling that takes roots somewhere in her chest, dangerously close to the heart, she recognizes the signs when it tightens whenever she catches a glimpse of his smile or when their hands brush against each other not-so-accidentally. He smiles at her and with a pang of senseless irritation she thinks that even his smiles are soft and that’s unfair, nothing about it is fair. And the worst part is that there’s nothing she could do about the unfairness of it all and so she grows a little more vicious, a little more unmerciful with every passing day. It’s hard to feel anything other than frustration when he directs these ridiculously soft eyes at her, brimming with concern and sympathy, and she wants nothing more than to scream, scream out all this anger until she chokes on her own raw rage. 

She doesn’t deserve it.

She doesn’t deserve this softness, doesn’t deserve the smiles, the warmth of his hands or the unabashed comfort he offers, a promise of a cure that could soothe all her pains, both literal and figurative ones. 

That would be too easy, though, wouldn’t it?

Harukawa isn’t used to things that come easy. 

She’s used to fighting tooth and nail for things she wishes to protect and then watching it be placed just right outside of her reach. No matter how hard she fought, no matter how ardently she prayed, nothing she’s ever done turned out to be enough.

She’s learned to treat things that would come easy as traps, inconspicuous and insidious at first, just waiting for her to make a mistake, one wrong move enough to jeopardize any chance she’s ever had at getting closer to the life she always wished for, life she was robbed of. It’s just not meant to be.

Ever since she was a kid, the world revolved around the knives and guns and threats. She’s learned that the carefully guarded secrets spilling with the blade pressed against someone’s neck were the highest currency one could imagine but only if whispered against the right ear, placed in the right hands. She had no use for these secrets, forgetting them as soon as her job was done and she was dismissed, left to her own devices until new orders came, bringing the foul smell of death with them. 

She’s spent endless hours struggling to wash off the persistent smell of decaying bodies and the vibrant redness of drying blood staining the pale skin of her shaking hands. Eventually, time became useless and she started to count days in bodies, never bothering to learn names the names of her victims, never allowing herself to look them in the eyes, too scared of what she could possibly see there. Faceless arms reach out for her in her dreams, itching to wrap around her neck and squeeze, squeeze until her face turns blue, a striking contrast with all the blood that drips down her hands. 

You can’t build a relationship on lies. Or at least that’s what she’s heard, she doesn’t really know anything about relationships. 

She’s a lie. She’s a fraud, a grave mistake that never should have happened. Could it be selfish to drag Momota into that mess that she is? She did it once, back in the game, only to have the entire world fall apart around her, taking down any chances she had at being the person Momota believed she is, the person he was willing to help her be. 

Things aren’t all that different now, the fact that all of them turned out to be lies doesn’t change the fact that Momota’s hands are way too soft against her cold ones, it doesn’t make her lies any lesser. That life she remembers, a lifetime of being the assassin, it doesn’t go away just because it never happened, doesn’t go away just because they shaped her into some romanticized fantasy of a killer, courtesy of some underpaid Team Danganronpa writer. 

At her core, this is exactly who she is, this is what shaped her into this empty shell of a person she’s now, leaching onto any kind of softness Momota can offer her, not asking for anything in return in a true Momota fashion.

Sometimes, she wishes she could hate him, hate him for showing her that there’s another way, the whole new world she’s been missing out on. It’s so much easier to miss things that you have never had, some vague ideal, an illusion formed in your head that couldn’t possibly compare to the real thing. It’s a special kind of torture, one she imagines Danganronpa’s writers must be truly proud of. 

The fact that she’s been written that way is a weak consolation, just another fact reminding her that she could never be in control of her own fate, always a marionette in someone else’s hand, dancing and twirling however they wished her to. 

She wonders if Momota truly believed the things he said, all that nonsense about being good and freedom to choose your own path

All she knows is that she’s been stripped of any choice, scrambling to make some kind of sense in the world that screwed her over time and time again. 

And it hurts, it hurts so much, knowing that there was never a choice, and she knows it’s the kind of pain not even Momota’s soft hands or reassuring speeches could soothe, pain rooted so deeply she couldn’t possibly get rid of it, no matter how much she tried.

Momota is soft and softness is the last thing she deserves. 

**Author's Note:**

> I usually write Oumota, but I always wanted to write some kind of Maki character study. It's actually something I wrote a few months ago but for a long time I wasn't sure if I want to post it on AO3? But, as you can see, I decided to do that, heh. 
> 
> Anyways, I hope you enjoyed it! Comments and kudos are very welcome & if you want to find more of my writing or just talk about V3 you can find me on my Tumblr @golden-redhead!


End file.
